EU officials visit site of Turkish bird flu outbreak

Authorities call for calm but remain on alert

A Kosovo Albanian inspects chickens in a poultry market in Pristina yesterday. Following bird flu cases in neighboring states, Kosovars worry about their poultry becoming infected.

KIZIKSA (AP) - A two-member EU inspection team yesterday visited the Turkish village where the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus killed more than 1,800 domestic birds.

Earlier in the morning, the officials visited one of the many large poultry farms outside the quarantine zone around the village, and then were taken to a field where 1,886 turkeys died of the disease over a day and a half.

Military police have been guarding the entrance to the field since the outbreak was detected, and members of the media were not permitted to go with the officials.

The EU officials — a veterinarian from Denmark and a food safety expert from Belgium — have made very limited public statements, but have said they were pleased with Turkey’s response to the outbreak.

Turkey says the disease has been contained, but authorities are on the alert as mysterious bird deaths continue to be reported across the country.

Yesterday, paramilitary forces sealed off a roadside field in the neighboring province of Kutahya, where some dead quails were found, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Samples from the dead birds were to be sent to a lab in Izmir, western Turkey, for testing for bird flu. Anatolia said there were some 500 quails on the field, but did not say how many of them were dead. It said the live birds would be culled.

Agriculture Ministry official Bekir Gencer said “the first impression is that it is not bird flu,” Anatolia reported.

The H5N1 strain was also recently confirmed in Romania, and tests are ongoing to find out whether birds that died of bird flu on a Greek island near Turkey also died of the same strain. This strain of bird flu can kill a large number of birds very quickly, but the EU officials have stressed that it remains primarily a veterinary problem.

Bird experts and Turkish authorities have said the H5N1 virus, an identical strain to the one that killed millions of birds in Asia, was likely carried by migrating birds which stop here every year on their way to wintering areas in Africa.

The turkeys which died probably either mingled with wild birds carrying the virus or came into contact with contaminated feces on the field, experts say.

On Monday night, the officials ate a chicken dinner to calm fears about the danger the virus presents to humans.

Some 60 people died of H5N1 bird flu in Asia, most of them poultry workers in daily contact with birds.

Properly cooked poultry and eggs present no known danger to humans, health officials say.

SKOPJE (AP) - Authorities in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) said yesterday they will quarantine a small southern village and send a suspect chicken sample to England for flu testing following the outbreak of a highly contagious but common bird disease.

Sloboden Cokrevski, the director of FYROM’s state Veterinarian Administration, said a “forbidden zone” would be set up around a 3-square-kilometer (1-square-mile) area near the southern village of Mogila, just outside the city of Bitola, and that 10,000 chickens would be culled following an outbreak of Newcastle disease.

Cokrevski said the cull would be carried out due to the Newcastle disease outbreak. The disease is not a threat to humans but can paralyze and kill bird species. It is different to bird flu and is caused by a different virus.

Bitola is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the Greek border. Cokrevski said a test of 40 chickens found that 39 had Newcastle disease but one had a type of “strange flu” that FYROM authorities could not diagnose. A sample was to be sent to London for further testing.